The First Human Starship

After observing the anniversary of 9-11 on Wednesday with all of the thoughts that the anniversary of that event brings up in terms of good versus evil and demonstrations of the depths that we can sink to as human beings, it was a joy on Thursday to see the press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirming that the Voyager I spacecraft is now travelling in interstellar space.

For those who might have somehow missed the news, the “tl;dr” version is this (no math, I promise):

• “Empty space” in the galaxy is not quite empty – the sun and our solar system are surrounded by and travel through the “interstellar medium”, an extremely thin plasma (a few hundred atoms per cubic meter or less) which contains a magnetic field oriented on the galactic plane.
• The solar wind put off constantly by the sun creates a “bubble” in the interstellar medium, filled with a plasma shed by the sun (via the solar wind) and a magnetic field oriented on the sun.
• This bubble stretches out about twelve billion miles from the sun, or over three times as far out as the orbit of Pluto.
• The plasma inside this bubble surrounding the sun is considerably different from the plasma in the interstellar medium, both in temperature and composition.
• The magnetic field inside this bubble points in a different direction than the magnetic field in the interstellar medium.
• Where the plasma from the sun collides with the plasma from the interstellar medium (this is kind of a teardrop shaped area as the solar system travels along) is an area called the “heliopause”.
• Based on all of this, it was predicted that when Voyager I passed into interstellar space, crossing into the heliopause, there would be: 1) A huge jump in the density of the plasma; 2) A huge change in the temperature of the plasma, and; 3) A change in the magnetic field of the plasma.

The JPL news conference confirmed that all three of these observations have been confirmed. It took a while to make the confirmation because some of the instruments on Voyager I have failed over the years. (It was launched in 1977.) The good folks at JPL also wanted to be very, very sure before they made such a momentous and historic announcement.

Some very clever scientific detective work let them verify that Voyager I is definitely in interstellar space now. Working backwards and going over the old data, they now believe that the boundary was  crossed on or about August 25, 2012.

Think about that for a second. Something made by men and women in the 1970’s, with only about 1/240,000th of the computer memory that your iPhone has, not only went by Jupiter and Saturn, but now after over thirty-five years in space as the fastest thing ever created by humans has left the solar system behind and is travelling outward in interstellar space. Not only that, but it’s phoning home to tell us about it!

Voyager I is the first human starship.

Think of our solar system as a large bay of water. Throughout all of human history, we’ve lived on the shore and the water has been a mystery which we’ve dreamed of exploring. In the last hundred years or so, we’ve waded out a little bit into the shallow water (flying). In the last fifty or so years we’ve started to take a few trips out into the bay with a few tiny ships (space travel). Crewed vessels may only have gotten a few hundred yards offshore, but we have sent robot vessels to slowly start to explore the entire bay. Now for the very first time one of our robot vessels has gone beyond the mouth of the bay out into the ocean, free of our bay, never to return. With that perspective we’re also really seeing for the first time that our bay, which we think of as huge, is actually infinitesimally tiny.

Some have complained that this new perspective reduces us as humans, makes us puny and small. I think they couldn’t be more wrong. That’s the exact opposite of what it does. While it does indeed show that we are in a very tiny corner of a unimaginably vast universe, it also shows that we can be smart enough and strong enough to go out into that vast universe and explore it, if we dare to.

That does not make me feel puny or small. It makes me feel joyous and proud.

When most of us think of the term “starship” we think of fictional vessels such as the Enterprise or Millennium Falcon. I believe that someday we’ll have those ships, carrying humans from this solar system out to the stars. But the annals of history will always show that the first human vessel sent to the stars was Voyager I. It fills me with happiness to have seen it launch, seen what it taught us, and now to have seen that it has indeed left us behind for interstellar space.